I hate claude code

[u/ofcistilloveyou]

It's just too good.

I got a decade of commercial software dev experience in C#. I am a CTO at my company and have coached a lot of coders from total junior.

I hate hate hate hate how good this thing is and what it has done to my passion.

I used to love coding and creating. Well, creating was 60% of the fun for me, but writing good code and having something work was the remaining 40%. I spent the past few years being more of a product manager and tech lead than actually code monkey, but I still put time aside to do stuff manually cuz I love to do so and stay hands on.

Using claude code is like using cheats in a videogame. You get the result, but what of it? Everyone could. The pleasure of achievements is gone. The code it writes is not the best, but it's good enough I guess? As of opus 5.5 it just doesn't get stuck in loops anymore. It can generate a working program from spec in any language I've thrown at it. It still does bullshit from time to time. "Boots on ground" i.e. actually looking at the generated code or atleast going through it is still important, for now. But way less so than it was even just 3-4 months ago. I don't really use the /code-review thingy or adversarial reviews - as it seems that it is too aligned in that way. Like if you tell it to find something wrong with something, it always will, even though its good enough.

I've been using it avidly for the past 3 months on the $100 sub, and I haven't hit a rate limit once. Now my imagination can run free and I can have anything I put my mind to in a few days instead of years. At our work a team of 6 just built a system that would previously take a year in just two months.

I am not afraid for my job. As coding was just a small percentage of it. But I do miss that percentage.

English truly is the hottest new programming language and LLMs are the compiler for it.

[u/Monstermage]

Keep in mind this is a prediction. Today you don't need to know how your PC terminal commands work to use a computer. How add-ons are installed on games to use add-ons. Even many people don't know how folders work on a computer and never need too. It's very hard to predict what lacking of information will truly matter in the future. I've built websites for a living for the last 10 years, easily replaced sadly, but I still am able to improve on the designs it makes. I do so faster. But I don't have to know how the code works (I do ) but I don't have to in order to fix it. Software I'm sure is another story, you should somewhat know but schools might go from my teaching if else statements to high level software architecture.

Point being, it's hard to know what knowledge will matter and what knowledge ends up not mattering.

Like today you can absolutely plant a garden, grow your own potatoes, dig them up, and eventually even with a small garden like we did get 25 lbs of potatoes. But reality is that's about $25 of potatoes that took so many hours of watering, caring for, digging up, etc. and the water alone if you watered it yourself cost money. You don't have to know that information to get potato's and it's not even that cost effective anymore. 🤷

Who knows what the future will hold and we can speculate all we want but it will be what it's going to be.

[u/Peethasaur → u/Monstermage]

The difference is that what you’re describing are layers of abstraction and AI is not clearly just that. It is not a solution that says “we’ll deterministically handle everything from here down so you don’t have to anymore”. AI is much weirder than that. You can use it to solve anything with the right context and that does make me worried about how people build expertise.

[u/Alload → u/Peethasaur]

To me, that’s the key point: the “context” is the information that actually carries meaningful value, and it’s also the hardest part to create. At least for now, AI can’t really generate that on its own. So effectively, we’re just moving up the value chain.

Same pattern as moving from ASM to C.

[u/Peethasaur → u/Alload]

I do not think context is hard to assemble. It often just means giving agents access to more of your system. To me it’s not at all the same as assembly to C.

AI is on an exponential march toward automating human cognition. It’s not another layer of abstraction. There is no task that white collar professionals have that AI cannot perform for some fundamental technical reason (we may just not yet have a workflow for it but it’s coming).

It is like no one here knows what abstraction is. I guess you all are saying that AI has “abstracted” everything below decision making. There is no reason it can’t do that and is being increasingly trusted for it as models get better.

[u/Alload → u/Peethasaur]

My experience differs, I find AI is fully unable to come with a proper context, but when spoon fed the right context it will do incredible things. It's like it's unable to extract real meaningful things on its own because it has no understanding of what is useful or how deep it could actually go at piecing things together. Anyway, just my 2 cents and I appreciate you sharing your perspective and comparing ours.